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Wild-Card Characters

The shell also facilitates the ease in working with files through filename expansion---matching filenames with `wild-card' characters or `meta' characters:

• * matches any character string (sequence of characters)
• ? matches any single character
• [A-Z] matches a range of upper-case characters, etc.

Note that the shell does the expansion, not the program (unlike VMS). Thus, a command like cd foo* is perfectly O.K. as long as you have only one file beginning with `foo', but cp *.c *.c .bak probably won't do what you want. After performing the expansion, the shell locates the command you want using the current PATH (see Login) and runs it passing the blank-delimited command-line arguments as arguments to the program. Control returns to the shell when the program finishes running.

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